The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  Also her father’s needs must be met. Not until she was quite certain that he was provided with sufficient material to keep him occupied throughout her own seclusion could she happily enter it. This was more complex, demanding much forethought and – more even than advance secretarial assistance – a sensitive care for his still volatile condition. Already he had begun to wonder how he was to manage alone without the daily, sometimes hourly, encouragement she had given to his spirit. He understood well enough what concentration her task must exact, and knew that once it was begun he would have almost as little right as Tilly or Alice or any of the other servants to trouble her with demands. The prospect daunted him.

  His consternation increased when he learnt that she had no intention of working in the library with him, and that not even the muniments room next door would satisfy her needs. Louisa had known all along that such proximity would not serve. Her father’s fits and starts, the outbursts of spleen, the exclamations of delight and groans of frustration to be heard through the library door were an indispensable portion of his working rhythm, and firm though her powers of concentration were, they could not easily exclude such rumblings. Nor would he be able to resist the temptation of turning to her with some brief triumph of prosody or some problem that he must finally solve alone. It were best, for both their sakes, that such temptation be removed in advance.

  “But how will you do?” he protested. “I mean, the books, the texts, they are all here, in the library, where they belong. Surely it is better to have you here at a desk of your own rather than stealing in and out like a burglar?” Before she could speak, he anticipated her reply. “And if you take a volume elsewhere, suppose it be the very one I need myself? What then? No, we can’t have that. You must think again.”

  She smiled at his flustered grimace. “All the texts I need I have by heart. You shall not find I have burgled your shelves, I promise you. Nor will you have any interruption other than Alice with your tray of tea when you ring for it. As for my own needs, they are simple – pens, pencils, an ample supply of ink, a ream or two of good rag paper and a bobbin of green ferret to bind my chapters. Nothing more.”

  His lips wrinkled beneath the promontory of his nose. “I don’t care for it,” he said. “I don’t greatly care for it.”

  What he did not care for was this transfer of his solitude onto terms that would no longer be entirely of his own making. Louisa saw it without resentment – there was not a man in the land who had taken upon himself a higher and more difficult task, or a lonelier one. If he chafed a little at this severance from his sole intellectual companion, that was to be expected, but there was more at stake here, for both of them, than mere convenience.

  “How shall I do without you?” he said mournfully. “You are as needful to my work as light itself.”

  “Perhaps I have been so,” she answered quietly. “But do we not both know that what I have been able to do for you is accomplished now – apart from this last service which requires seclusion if it is to be done well?”

  Agnew sighed and leant his cheek against the hand she had laid softly at his shoulder. It was true. One could travel so far with a companion but a moment eventually came – perhaps the most sacred moment of all – when one must stand alone before the elemental powers and make one’s report as best one might. It was as true of work of this order as it was of death itself. If an old heart quailed at either prospect, that was only to remind oneself of what must never be forgotten – one’s own human frailty. Yet the thought came hard.

  “Also,” Louisa added, “I have recently begun to wonder whether my attentions may not have impeded as much as they have assisted the free flow of your own particular thought… That in ways neither of us could have anticipated, I may have come to stand between you and your inward light.”

  “Never think so, child.”

  “But I do. And you should consider it too.”

  “I cannot count the hours I should have lost without you.”

  “Nor those you might have gained had I not been there to break the tension of your mind. It may be that both statements are true. It may be that when you return to your own true solitude all that has been arrested flowers there again. I truly think it may be so.”

  He looked up into her anxious face and smiled, shaking his old head in resignation. “It seems we must find out.”

  “We shall. It may even prove that – apart and invisible – we shall be all the more deeply present to one another as we work.”

  “You make it sound as though you would take to some desert island,” he said in an attempt at levity.

  “I almost think I shall.”

  “Your rooms are no desert, my dear.”

  Aware that a critical moment had been reached, she kept her own voice light. “Nor can I work there – hearing the servants bustle about, knowing what is being done and what remains to do, wondering who is at the door, or how some squabble between kitchen maids might soonest be sorted.”

  Agnew frowned. “Then what did you have in mind?”

  Louisa gathered her breath. “I thought – the Decoy Lodge.”

  And her father’s frown darkened. “That place. I cannot hear of it. The Lodge has been empty for years. The thatch… You will freeze to death. Whatever has possessed you to imagine that…”

  “I think you are forgetting that Henry had the roof recoated, Father. You know how fond he is of the Lodge. You humoured his desire to make use of it at times.”

  “But it is no place for you.” There was a note now in Agnew’s voice which would brook no further argument.

  Louisa heard, and ignored it. “On the contrary, I think it perfect for my needs. I shall work there like an anchoress in her cell, untroubled by the daily round, with a fine prospect of the lake to inspire me, and all the peace the contemplative life could ask.”

  “It is an unwholesome place, I tell you. The atmosphere is not… conducive to…”

  Louisa waited a moment for the end of his sentence and, when it did not come, smiled in gentle exasperation. “But you have not been there for years. You would not even cross the lake to admire the improvements which Henry made. In any case, I shall bring my own atmosphere with me.”

  Agnew’s frown became a scowl which he sought to avert from his daughter’s gaze. Privately he was appalled to discover that, even after all these years, the very mention of the Decoy Lodge should send this thrill of horror coursing through him. The child could have no notion of the turmoil provoked by her senseless fancy. The Lodge was an evil place. If it had not been so before the time of his own father – “Madcap” Agnew – then that depraved man had certainly defiled it. Whatever changes young Henry had made, they could never exorcize that shadow. Nothing could.

  There was much in his son of which Agnew disapproved, and not least the boy’s brief and perverse attachment to the Decoy Lodge – an attachment which had been formed (Agnew sometimes believed) only because he himself was so evidently discountenanced by it. Yet there it was, and to preserve his own quiet life Agnew had given young Henry a free hand in the matter of the restoration. The work had been finished some years before, and he had wished no knowledge of it. Nor had he been displeased when his son’s interest in the place had faded almost as quickly as it had arisen, but that Louisa should now plan to make use of the accursed spot – this more than any other aspect of her enterprise was incomprehensible to him. Alarmed that she would not accept his first refusal, and unable to confess the true reasons for his resistance, he cast about for further argument.

  “It can hardly prove convenient,” he blustered. “By the time you have walked around the lake, the morning will be half lost.

  “I shall go by skiff. It will be a large part of the pleasure of the thing – to strike out each day across the lake and make landfall on another shore. By the time I arrive, my head will be as clear as crystal, ready for the pen.”

  “And if it rains?”

  “I shall get wet.”

  “And
catch your death.”

  She laughed at his disgruntled moue. “I have asked Jem Bales to lay in a store of fuel. I shall be cosy as Christmas there.”

  “You have begun to make your dispositions already then?”

  “I had not thought you would object.”

  “I do. It is a solitary place. Who knows what…”

  “Pedro will be with me there.”

  “To roll his belly for an intruder to tickle?”

  “He has more fight in him than that. But who should intrude?”

  “One never knows.”

  “Would you have me take your old fowling piece with me?”

  “I would not have you go at all.”

  She was breathing quickly now. Not until this conflict had she realized how largely the occupation of the Lodge had figured in her vision, and more painful than the prospect of its loss was the knowledge that this was the first time her father had sought to refuse her anything. At a moment when she had believed herself launched at last on the independent creativity of an adult life, it seemed he was determined to keep her confined.

  “Of course,” she said quietly, “if you forbid it…”

  Agnew looked up into eyes where defiance and disappointment contended. He too was conscious that such conflict between them was unprecedented; conscious also of how uncharitable must appear this bitter repayment of his debt to her. “Need it come to that?” he asked.

  “Only if you insist.”

  He saw that her heart was set upon the thing and could not credit it. “It seems I have no right to forbid you anything.”

  “You have a father’s right.”

  Restrained as it was, never had there been such heat between them. He shook his head and sighed. “But you have been more than an obedient daughter to me.”

  “Then be more than an overzealous father,” she demanded. “Let me have my way in this one thing.”

  She had no idea what she was asking of him, and therefore how arbitrary his resistance must seem; yet the truth could not be told. With a failing spirit he said, “This matters greatly to you?”

  “It does.”

  There was a winning brightness to her eyes, a wistfulness that melted his resistance. Perhaps the fears were only his own, and the real wrong would be to inflict them now on her? It must be so, for to cast his own shadow across her eager enthusiasm would be to do to her, though far less vilely, what his own father had once done to him. Somewhere that curse must cease. “I cannot for the life of me see why,” he said at last, “but on my soul, dear Lou, if that is what you want and need, then you must have it, I suppose.”

  So warm was her embrace, so filled with delight the kisses planted on his crown, he could almost forget the uneasiness incited in him.

  Three days later, Louisa rowed across the lake to light the first of her fires in the Decoy Lodge. It was a chill November morning, the wildfowl bending their flight against a stiff breeze, Pedro panting in the stern of the skiff. The Hall receded before her sight with Tilly waving from the boathouse as though her mistress were embarked on an Atlantic voyage to the New World – which, in a way, Louisa told herself, she was. She was coming at last into her own kingdom, for though the work awaiting her remained ancillary to her father’s greater task, it was for the first time truly her own.

  She rounded the bend of the lake and the Hall vanished behind the Mount. The moon still shone, a shadow of itself by day, but clear and cold as a lucid mind. She heard the water gurgle beneath the skiff. The morning was damp at her lips. Already as she rowed an opening paragraph was taking shape in her thoughts, yet every sense was alert to the raw, quick mystery of things being there, around her, in a mist-lit array of detail that no human mind could ever have conceived. This was truly to live, and with such a glittering sense of purpose that her heart was in her mouth to think of it.

  Then the skiff was bumping against the jetty at the Decoy Lodge, and Pedro bounded barking ashore. She made her vessel fast and looked up at her waiting hermitage. She saw the neat stack of seasoned ash that Jem had laid for her, the pump new-primed and straw set ready there against the frost. Though the Lodge had been aired these past two days, she had insisted that this morning no fire be lit, for this was to be her own small ritual. There in the hearth of the room overlooking the lake she would kindle her own flame. This was her furnace, her athanor. By its heat the clear alembick of her mind would make the fixed volatile, the volatile fixed, so that eventually, at Nature’s pace, the stone of her work might shine.

  The kindling caught and flame enthused among dry logs. She warmed her hands then stepped solemnly towards the desk at the lakeward window. All her needs were waiting there. Pedro stretched before the fire. The room was very still. She leant across the desk and cleared the condensation from the glass to look out over the lawn, the lake, the park and distant woodland. “Nature takes delight in Nature,” she quoted to herself, softly aloud. “Nature contains Nature, and Nature can overcome Nature.”

  Then she seated herself, took a crisp sheet of paper, dipped her pen in the inkwell and, in her fine copperplate hand, inscribed:

  An Open Invitation

  to

  The Chymical Wedding

  being

  An Inquiry into the Great Experiment

  of Nature

  and

  A Modest Prolegomenon

  to

  A Fuller Revelation of the Hermetic Mystery

  Beneath which in a smaller hand she added this epigraph from the Rosarium Philosophorum:

  Nota bene: in arte nostri magisterii nihil est celatum a Philosophis excepto secreto artis, quod non licet cuiquam revelare: quodsi fieret, ille malediceretur et indignationem Domini incurreret et apoplexia moreretur.*

  Carefully she blotted the page and laid it to one side, then took another sheet and sat, smiling, as she sucked the end of her pen.

  * “Mark well: nothing is concealed by the Philosophers in the art of our magistery except the secret of the art which may not be revealed to all; for he who should do so would be accursed and incur the wrath of God, and die of the apoplexy.”

  7

  The Lady’s Name

  The door of the Decoy Lodge opened at my second knock. The instant of irritation on Laura’s face became embarrassment, then – perhaps – relief, though not quickly enough to forestall my mumbled apologies for having turned up unexpectedly. She recovered quickly and ushered me through to the kitchen where Edward sat at a scrubbed pine table, the sleeves of his sweater rolled back, one hand holding a tumbler of whisky so tightly I could see the veins at his wrist, gnarled and blue. The twitch of his moustache was his only concession to my smile, while the dubious eyes plainly regretted that earlier invitation to return.

  When he turned away from Laura’s welcoming chatter, it was obvious that I’d walked in on a row. She offered me a drink, poured it before I could demur, then indicated the empty chair between Edward’s and her own. Less than a minute had passed and already I was appointed buffer zone.

  Laura helped to make the running in a conversation that was falsified at every turn by Edward’s silence. The sensible course would have been to admit the moment badly chosen, but the more I saw of Laura’s nervous relief and Edward’s rudeness, the less sensible I felt. I had come with a purpose: better to broach it and see what happened. It would be interesting to watch the old man answer to his own rhetoric.

  “I’ve been thinking over what you said about dreams, Edward.”

  The turned face admitted having said nothing.

  “…That one should take them seriously, I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “However preposterous?”

  There were moments when Edward squinted at you as at small print. “Do you know what happens if you stop a man dreaming?” he demanded after a moment. “Persistently, I mean. He goes mad. One should take that seriously, don’t you think?”

  “From lack of sleep?” I suggested.

  Edward scowled. “We don’
t sleep to sleep, dammit, any more than we eat to eat. We sleep to dream. We’re amphibians. We live in two elements and we need both. Only the ego in its ignorance could be so preposterous as to pretend otherwise.”

  “But why should the ego do that?” I pressed. “…If dreams are so important, I mean.”

  For a moment Edward wondered whether this conversation was worth the breath, but the opportunity to air his thoughts got the better of him. “Because dreams have a knack of undermining the ego’s self-esteem, that’s why. They out-trump its impoverished efforts at control at every preposterous trick. They offer nightly demonstrations of what malleable stuff reality is made. Their invention is endless, insatiable, because they insist on the truth. On the whole truth.”

  “And nothing but? Didn’t Freud suggest that they might conceal sometimes… disguise things… lie even?”

  “Freud was…”

  Whatever Freud was I was left to guess, though the ticking of Edward’s brain implied that it was, at best, unsatisfactory. He emptied his glass and sniffed. “No doubt he had his reasons for saying so.”

  “But you don’t agree?”

  “I do not. Lies are a mere social convenience. In the dream-world we pass beyond the reach of social control. Which is why the dream is the last citadel of the free spirit. It’s the Archimedean Point – the place outside the world from which the world itself can be moved… if we dare to take it seriously enough.”

  Large claims – outrageous even – but I was used by now to his oracular manner, and was on the point of a deflationary reply when Laura said, quietly, “At the very least a life can turn on a dream,” and gave me pause.

  “You think so?”

  “Of course,” she answered. “It happens all the time.”